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Anton Ozmian
Anton Ozmian is a second-generation Lebanese American entrepreneur and tech mogul. He is the founder of the streaming technology company DigiFlood. Ozmian is described as tall and thin, with black hair graying at the temples and a close-cropped salt-and-pepper beard. He has a legendary temper and a reputation as a ruthless businessman. Early Life Ozmian grew up in Dedham, Massachusetts, a suburb on the outskirts of Boston, the grandson of Lebanese immigrants. The family attended Dedham's Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church, where Anton served as an altar boy. His grandfather and father were watchmakers and repairers of clocks, a dying profession at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Ozmian was nonetheless fascinated by the intricate mechanisms of fine watches, and his interest soon turned to the complex systems that made up computers and, eventually, the assembly language that made it all work. He saw a strong similarity between efficient coding and the inner workings of a fine Swiss watch: making the most use of as little energy as possible. At the age of twelve, Ozmian was serially sexually assaulted by the parish priest of Our Lady of Mercy, Father Anselm, who claimed God and Jesus approved and threatened him with hell and worse if he ever told. Ozmian subsequently suffered a mental breakdown and was diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia. He was admitted to King's Park Psychiatric Center on Long Island, where he was subjected to experimental electroconvulsive shock treatments. One of the side-effects was a loss of short-term memory, causing him to consciously forget he had received the treatments at all. He was eventually released, convinced that he had cured himself and tricked the administrators. He returned to Dedham and assaulted Father Anselm with a large crucifix in the middle of Sunday mass before the whole congregation, dropping the crucifix onto the bleeding and unconscious priest before walking calmly out the door. Adulthood After graduating summa cum laude from Stanford University, Ozmian threw himself into composing and cryptography, along with fly fishing and even big game hunting. Eventually he blended his interest in music and ciphers with his fanaticism for tight code, turning his passions into developing streaming and encoding technologies that he would use to launch DigiFlood, a company that made him one of the tech industry's richest men. Ozmian eventually married, and the couple had one child, a daughter named Grace. His wife later died in a plane crash when Grace was five. Anton and Grace were inseparable when she was young, and he denied her nothing. As she grew older, their relationship deteriorated as her life spiraled into drugs and reckless spending. He later remarried, this time to a Ukrainian model named Izolda. His second marriage lasted just nine months and ended in a very public divorce that landed his new ex-wife $90 million. Ozmian was eventually forced to put a halt to his financial support for his daughter. Her response was to leak DigiFlood's proprietary compression algorithms onto the internet, threatening the company itself. When he found out Grace was responsible for the leak, his temper got the better of him; in the resulting confrontation, he shot and killed his only child in a fit of rage. When his anger subsided, Ozmian realized that, even after achieving everything he thought he wanted in life, he still felt unfulfilled. His solution was to turn to an old forgotten hobby: big game hunting, with the ultimate prey—powerful people surrounded by security systems and personnel. He returned to the site where he had hidden Grace's body and removed her head, which he had stuffed and mounted as the first human trophy in a macabre hidden study in his apartment. As the FBI and NYPD continued to investigate Grace's murder, Anton Ozmian—often with the help of DigiFlood talent—planned and executed five more high-profile murders, each time defeating seemingly impenetrable high-tech security systems and highly-trained security details. He also found time to blackmail Bryce Harriman, who had interviewed Izolda Ozmian and published a derogatory article about Grace. Ozmian finally settled on his swan song: a live one-on-one Most Dangerous Game-style hunt with Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast, whom he had met while Pendergast was investigating Grace's murder alongside Vincent D'Agosta. Anton had become fascinated by the resourceful FBI agent, convinced that Pendergast's skillset would be his ultimate challenge. To lure Pendergast to the abandoned King's Park facilities, he used D'Agosta and Howard Longstreet as bait, abducting them and threatening to kill them both unless Pendergast agreed to the hunt. Ozmian ultimately killed Longstreet anyway, and wired D'Agosta with a bomb to encourage Pendergast to play by his rules. The showdown took place in a particularly decrepit part of the King's Park complex known as Building 93, where, through no coincidence, Ozmian had undergone his childhood treatment. Ozmian seemed to have the upper hand early, even capturing Pendergast after just eighteen minutes, though it turned out to be a calculated gambit on Pendergast's part: Ozmian gave the agent a second chance, releasing him with a ten minute head start. The second part of the hunt eventually led to the basement archives, where Pendergast wasted several rounds firing blindly at him in the dark. A desperate Pendergast locked him in the archives section and had stopped trying to disguise his movements, which Ozmian interpreted as the panic of desperation setting in. He followed Pendergast's trail to a room behind a strangely labeled closed door, and boldly entered after the trapped FBI agent spent his last bullet firing blindly through the door. Ozmian found himself in one of King's Park's old shock treatment rooms, where Pendergast—reading from a script he had found in the archives—recited a soothing spiel that spoke to lost memories Ozmian didn't know he had, rendering him calmly compliant as he reverted to the unresisting acceptance of treatments he had no memory of receiving. He allowed Pendergast to restrain him in the room's leather reclining treatment chair as his mind struggled to reconcile the sudden flood of recollection with his own reality and failed, plunging him headlong into madness. Category:Characters